Network Engineer, Foundations and Support

Meta; Beaver Dam, Lebanon, Cedar Rapids (WI, IN, IA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Meta is seeking a Network Operations Engineer to support ENS with hyperscale DC cabling, fiber connectivity, and IP networking. You will scope, develop, and implement strategies with internal teams, vendors, and network design groups to improve operational supportability and reliability across its global infrastructure.

The role emphasizes root-cause analysis, automation, and cross-functional leadership to drive impactful outcomes in a fast-moving environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree completed.
• 4+ years operating and designing large-scale networks.
• Experience with optical and physical layer infrastructure.
• Strong communication with vendors and partners.
• Experience with service provider and data center networks.

Responsibilities

• Lead incident response for global infra events and major SEVs.
• Drive change management for security and continuity in network ops.
• Improve operational efficiency and automate processes across teams.
• Set and communicate team goals and roadmaps for global sites.
• Identify and manage data and asset protection risks.
• Help drive metrics to improve quality, efficiency and cost.

Skills

Network operations

Vendor engagement

Executive communication

AI integration

Root cause analysis

Cross-functional leadership

Infra reliability

Incident response

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or related field

Tools

Cisco/Nexus routers/switches

NMS/SDN tooling

DWDM/optical networking gear

Fiber test equipment

Job description

About

Meta is looking for a forward thinking Network Operations Engineer to support delivery of field services as part of our Edge and Network Services (ENS) team. Ideal candidate to possess subject matter expertise in hyperscale DC structured cabling, fiber connectivity solutions, and IP networking. Candidates will also have experience scoping developing and implementing strategies and plan in partnership with internal business teams, external vendors, and network design/engineering, and other cross-functional teams to develop strategies for integrating new technologies and to better support existing technologies across the operational fleet. An objective for this role is to understand technical drivers for the business, organize strategies to ensure the operational supportability to meet those business needs, and to represent ENS across stakeholder groups to ensure those critical projects are achieved. The team improves operational efficiency and reliability of one of the most advanced and rapidly evolving networks in the world. The right candidate will possess experience in a fast moving organization and enjoy digging into operational pain points in order to implement the process enhancements and automation solutions to solve them. The ideal candidate loves identifying root causes in complex systems and quickly learning new domain expertise and technologies.

Responsibilities

• Incident Response: Drive work investigating complex technical and process issues on a global scale spanning multiple reliability, security, and continuity disciplines for infra during major incidents/site events (SEVs) on edge, caching, and network infrastructure. This will require you to work closely and effectively with a variety of cross functional teams, managed service providers, and third-party vendor partners
• Change Management: You will be integral to identifying problems and implementing effective change within security & business continuity issues that affect the network, edge, and Infrastructure at Meta. This may include driving initiatives regarding improvements to existing tools & processes and providing feedback on new policies, practices, procedures in order to scale with the rapid expansion of the Meta platform and customer base
• Operational Experience: As an operations practitioner within the ENS team you will be expected to drive operational efficiency in everything we do. In this role you will directly or indirectly oversee a large contingent workforce responsible for delivering roadmapped projects and executing on recurring operational activities. As such, identifying improvement opportunities across policies, processes, and procedures is essential to improve efficiency and quality of the activities. You will optimize service delivery with a keen focus on standards compliance across the network
• Team Leadership: Set team goals and work globally with cross-functional teams within and outside the organization to deliver business outcomes predictability across global sites. This also includes analysis around operational datasets to detect and inform the prioritization of problems to resolve. This often culminates in the creation and communication of aligned team projects, programs, and roadmaps
• Risk Management: Work with partner teams to design and implement aligned processes that identify and manage data and asset protection risks (i.e, security and privacy gaps, Business Continuity vulnerabilities), as well as operations continuity issues across the network
• Information and Data Assurance: Ensure relevant operational process, procedure, and policy documentation is effectively managed and the data required to support operations is complete and accurate in systems
• Automation: Be heavily involved in driving the team to analyze operational events in order to identify new automation opportunities and help us achieve our vision of all Tier-1 faults in the network being fully remediated by software. This will include helping others understand our requirements and drive their roadmaps, in some cases, directly implementing light weight solutions in code
• Data Measurement: As an operations practitioner supporting our network, you will be expected to drive quality into the metrics we report to assist us in focusing on the areas that give us the best return on investment. This could include measurement and analysis of our escalation issues, fault/event trends, infrastructure capacity, and vendor performance failures. You should have the experience to formulate the right metrics and definitions of success to drive quality, efficiency, cost, and timeliness, and evolve these over time to match changes to the infrastructure and business requirements
• Communication: provide clear and effective communication around personal and team goals, progress, outcomes, and lessons learned across assigned scope
• Travel: International and Domestic travel may be required 25% of the time and up to 50% of time depending on needs of the business

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Degree must be completed prior to joining Meta
• 4+ years of work experience operating, deploying, and designing large-scale network, optical, and/or physical layer infrastructure
• Hands-on experience with a variety of optical/network communication equipment including optical amplifiers, coherent transponders, network/fiber/copper test gear and other WDM equipment as well as associated tools and test equipment
• 4 + years of network operations experience while supporting large-scale service provider, datacenter, and/or enterprise network infrastructure
• Communication experience: demonstrated skills to effectively engage with hardware vendors, service providers, and colocation facility vendors globally and effectively translate performance issues into technical engineering requirements
• Experience in providing technical guidance to external vendors
• Intermediate subject matter expertise in Network Services, including topology, traffic analysis, hardware platform, and architectures
• 4+ years of experience with telecommunication networks in the terrestrial optical transport networks including DWDM, network infrastructures, optical testing, optical measurement principles, structured cabling and experience with photonic layer
• Subject matter expertise with physical infrastructure design: rack elevations, cable types, connector types, optic types, patch panels, and facility infrastructure
• Familiarity with Enterprise and Service Provider network hardware platforms and architectures, including Cisco and Juniper routers/switches and Nexus data center switching hardware platforms
• Experience with physical data center design: rack elevations, cabling, fiber optics, power/cooling, and facility infrastructure
• Experience with network hardware platforms and architectures including Ciena, Infinera, Nokia, Arista, Cisco WDM Equipment Experience moving technical or engineering programs and products from inception to delivery and experience articulating the impact using metrics
• Direct leadership experience with global Network Operations Center (NOC) environments and managing Service Level Agreements and continuous improvement against metrics at scale
• Experience with purchasing, negotiating and end-to-end supplier management, such as managing global RFPs and contract negotiations
• Advanced executive leadership communications experience
• Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools to optimize/redesign workflows and drive measurable impact (e.g., efficiency gains, quality improvements)
• Experience adhering to and implementing responsible, ethical AI practices (e.g., risk assessment, bias mitigation, quality and accuracy reviews)
• Demonstrated ongoing AI skill development (e.g., prompt/context engineering, agent orchestration) and staying current with emerging AI technologies